Saturday, April 16, 2011

"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold I know no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry." - Marina Tsvetaeva

Weariness and beauty permeate the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva. She struggled with life and love, but endured, supported in part by fellow artists, most notably Mandelstam, Rilke and Pasternak. The poetry in this selection is arrayed in chronological order and ranges from the "starry nights, in the apple orchards of Paradise"(p 5) to the "muffled blow" of Epitaph (p 106). Inspiration from fellow poets Mayakovsky, Blok and Akhmatova impress upon the reader her poetic muse and mystery. I like the poetry infused with literary references, Shakespeare and others, as this is a type that I share with her - in my own humble way. She has a way of making the simplest image seem to embody meaning beyond the possibilities of a finite world. She suggests this and more in lines like:

"a manifestly yellow, decidedly

rusty leaf--has been left behind on the tree." (p 120)

Poetic beauty that transcends my ability to describe the feelings it embodies.

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About Me

The bookcase of early childhood is a man's companion for life. The arrangement of its shelves, the choice of books, the colors of spines are for him the color, height, and arrangement of world literature itself. As for books which were not included in that first bookcase--they were never to force their way into the universe of world literature. Every book in the first bookcase is, willy-nilly, a classic, and not one of them can ever be expelled. - Osip Mandelstam